How can I watch full size video on 1 monitor and work on another?

Here is my situation. I have 3 monitors hooked up to my new PC running off 2 video cards. When I watch a video on one of the monitors and make it go full screen on that monitor it is great, however as soon as I click anywhere on one of the other 2 monitors, it makes me lose the full screen mode of the video and makes it go back to its original size. This happens when watching a flash or silverlight based video in Google chrome as well as when I watch video from a player such as iTunes.

Is it possible to make a video play fullscreen on one of my monitors and still work in the other two screens without losing my full screen mode on the one monitor?

FYI) I am running 2 Radeon HD 4650 cards

JasonDavis

Posted 2010-05-06T22:11:37.637

Reputation: 4 852

Answers

Like you mentioned this is the result of using the browser/flash. Playing the equivalent video in VLC or some other video player would give the desired result.

If you are serious about it you could try out some tools that download the flash video, then play those locally in your own player. I know VLC will play .flv files. If you go this way I would be interested in knowing how it turns out.

Update

Based on my recent experience, Google Chrome now plays the full screen flash videos in a separate full screen window that allows usage of other programs on secondary monitors.

I'm using the dev channel which is currently at 17.0.932.0 dev-m, but I also know I've been aware of this functionality for a while.

mindless.panda

Posted 2010-05-06T22:11:37.637

Reputation: 6 642

I have not tried VLC or other yet, but I have tried itunes player and it actually makes it full screen on the 1 monitor and the 2 others become black and I cannot access or see anything on the 2 others. As for downloading the video, that would not be feasible, as I am talking about hundreds of video/tv shows from hulu, netflix, and youtube – JasonDavis – 2010-05-06T22:30:10.853

Just an update, on the version of Chrome that I am using as of today, when I full screen flash it allows usage of other monitors. In fact, the full screen flash video almost always has its own entry on the taskbar. – mindless.panda – 2011-11-08T18:06:28.963

that sounds amazing, thanks for the info (do you know if chrome auto updates or do you have a beta?) – JasonDavis – 2011-11-08T21:35:45.450

Chrome definitely auto updates, but there are differences between stable, beta, and development "channels". Check here for more info on accessing and running different channels.

– mindless.panda – 2011-11-10T16:06:02.997

Now that this is a popular question, just confirming that newer Chrome versions do take care of this issue – JasonDavis – 2012-05-22T16:30:03.590

I'm not sure if the specs of your system would be enough to handle this, but you could run a virtual machine on one of the monitors and watch video in there... That way click outside that monitor won't get passed to Flash running inside that virtual machine.

Josh

Posted 2010-05-06T22:11:37.637

Reputation: 7 540

The Radeon Driver Stack has an option called "Theater Mode"

alt text

Lightly Salted

Posted 2010-05-06T22:11:37.637

Reputation: 777

NVidia has a similar feature, but I don't think that will work with Flash, as it's not hardware accelerated – dbr – 2010-05-06T23:06:51.310

Oh Yes, that right ...The Flash. The solution I use is to not use browser for my viewing pleasure. I use Boxee. then force it full screen on monitor #2. there is Repo's to add the majority of flash/streaming content on the Internet(S). – Lightly Salted – 2010-05-06T23:41:21.353

I had a fix that worked for me before... it no longer works, but I don't know if it's because of something I did with my computer, or if it just won't work with the current version of the flash player or what. BUT... the fix that used to work great was to swap out the NPSWF32.dll file with an edited version. There are directions on how to do it all over the internet... google "dual monitors full screen NPSWF32.dll"

Hopefully that'll work for ya. I have to keep looking for another solution since it doesn't work for me anymore.

Jim

Posted 2010-05-06T22:11:37.637

Reputation: 11